What would have been funny, I guess, would be picking a couple dozen of her own tracks. She didn’t do that, though I thought it was hilarious to start the playlist with a song with the same title as one of hers. Let’s face it: if I’m going to be trolled by a gorgeous woman who’s probably a whole lot smarter than I am, first choice has got to be Taylor Swift.

Last time I wandered over to YouTube, I found a playlist labeled as “My Mix.” Surely not my mix?

Of the 50-odd tracks, I’d actually played about two-thirds before. The others — well, I assume they thought I’d be interested, based on other videos viewed. Interestingly, four were by Sly and the Family Stone.

This was the eleventh track proffered, a Robyn Adele Anderson cover of a System of a Down tune:

Inevitably, there is a Hamilton “mixtape” already being hawked at the iTunes Store, though formal release will not be until Friday, December 2. A few tracks are already being sold. $14.99 for the whole thing.

Now this seems ingenious. Rebecca Black (yes, that Rebecca Black) has regularly released her Spotify playlists to her not-inconsiderable fanbase; this week, she’s actually put together a video in which she features some of her faves.

Lots of songs have numbers in their titles: from “5-4-3-2-1” to “99 Luftballons.” But what makes a great “number song”? Music journalist and self-appointed rock numerologist David Klein has spent years researching this very question for his new book If 6 was 9.

The Lost Ogle, an obscure local social blog in Oklahoma City with approximately 376,000 times as many readers as this place, has put up some ideas for The Ultimate Neil Diamond Mixtape. We of course approve, because (1) we’re Neil Diamond fans of long standing and (2) they didn’t mention “Sweet Caroline.”

This film, I’m hoping, might finally be going into production after several years in limbo:

Mixtape is a music-driven coming of age comedy about a 12-year-old girl, raised by her aunt, who never knew her mother. Finding a mixtape that once belonged to her mom, she accidentally destroys it. Since the music on the tape is the only link she has to her deceased parents, the girl sets out to track down each of the obscure songs listed on the tape’s case, finding out something about her parents, or herself, along the way. In 2009 the script won the American Zoetrope screenwriting contest and it appeared on the Black List that same year.

The “Black List” is a film-industry recognition of the best unproduced scripts, generally intended to impel someone actually to produce them. IMDb lists the film as “pre-production” as of the first of September, which may or may not mean anything.

The art — and make no mistake about it, it is an art — of making a mixtape is one lost on a generation that only has to drag and drop to complete a mix. There’s no love or passion involved in moving digital songs from one folder to another. Those “mixes” are just playlists held prison inside a device. There’s no blood, sweat and tears involved in making them.

And furthermore:

For the beauty of the mix tape alone, I’d love to see the cassette make a comeback, for everyone to have a chance to learn the art of the mix. I know, they can easily do that on a computer. But there’s something about the finished product, the feel of the cassette in your hand, the hand-written track list, that fine string of tape you can pull out of the cassette in a fit of emotion when the relationship sours and your boyfriend returns the tape with all your other stuff, that makes this artifact of another era so much more than just a playlist.